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Uneasy Allies

Bush Has Become Blair's Burden

By Mary Dejevsky

Sunday, October 10, 2004; Page B01

LONDON

Two and a half weeks ago, the shadows that had hung over Tony Blair's prime ministership since the end of major combat operations in Iraq suddenly fell especially dark. Kenneth Bigley, a British engineer kidnapped in Iraq, was under sentence of death. The two Americans captured with him had already been beheaded. Confirmation of each American death had come via a grisly Internet video, and Bigley's death was expected to follow. As in many newsrooms across Britain, we crowded around the television that Wednesday evening, waiting, partly in dread, partly in macabre fascination, for the news that would surely come.

Yet the fatal notice did not come. Instead, before finally slaughtering Bigley last week, the kidnappers posted two harrowing videos of the British hostage begging for his life. In both, his message was addressed directly to the prime minister: "I need you to help me now, Mr. Blair," he said, "because you are the only person on God's earth who can help me."

Grim reminder: The fate of hostage Kenneth Bigley put more pressure on Tony Blair, placing the Iraq war back at the center of British politics.
(Reuters)

On this side of the Atlantic, the videos served to focus attention not only on the barbaric methods of the hostage-takers but also on the chaos in Iraq and on Blair himself as the American president's puppet and the author of British misfortune. The prime minister's alliance with George W. Bush, who is widely seen here as having dragged Britain into a disaster, has become a huge political liability, one that Downing Street tries, often effectively, to play down.

What's more, Britons who followed the first debate between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry felt their contributions to the U.S. war effort passed almost unmentioned, even by the president's supposedly worldly, alliance-loving Democratic challenger. Being America's ally today is seen here as a dangerous, thankless task.

For Blair, the timing of the hostage videos could hardly have been worse. The tape appeared just days before he and his cabinet were due in Brighton for the annual Labor Party conference, where some activists were plotting an all-out revolt against British involvement in Iraq. They wanted a debate on the war and a date for British troops to be withdrawn. The last thing Blair needed was a dead British hostage to haunt proceedings. The next to last thing he needed was a live hostage, with fiercely antiwar and publicity-conscious relatives appealing to the prime minister to save his life. Then, to heighten Blair's dilemma, the specter of Bigley appeared again on our screens, this time shackled and caged and branding the prime minister a liar.

If Abu Musab Zarqawi, the reputed leader of the presumed hostage-takers, was hoping to use Bigley as an opportunity to separate the United States and its most loyal ally in the way that the Madrid train bombings had divorced Spain from U.S. policies in Iraq, this was almost certainly a miscalculation. The videos of a sobbing Bigley ultimately did more to foment disgust with the kidnappers. His death will doubtless do the same. What the hostage crisis confirmed for the British public, however, was just who was in charge when it came to decisions such as how to handle a Briton's fate in Iraq. And it wasn't Prime Minister Blair.

The beheadings of the Americans launched much more than a death watch for Bigley. It began an extraordinary period of diplomatic signals and counter-signals about the possible release of Iraq's two leading female weapons scientists in return for the British hostage. Two Iraqi officials had said that their release was imminent. In London, British officials insisted that if the Iraqi women were to be released, that decision would be made quite separately from hostage considerations.

Then came word from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, blunt and to the point: No one was going to be released.

The Iraqis may have been handed sovereignty, but it was now clear where authority lay. Soon, the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who had recently arrived in New York from London, was saying the same: We cannot negotiate with kidnappers.

If Ken Bigley died, his relatives reflected acerbically, his death warrant would have been signed by the Americans.

We do not know why Bigley was initially treated differently from the two Americans. It is now clear that, for all their public insistence to the contrary, British officials had made contact with the extremists behind the scenes and may have indicated a willingness to negotiate.

That is one possible reason. Another theory is that the Bigley family's energetic maneuvers on TV and in videos, which were tailored -- probably on Foreign Office advice -- to his Muslim captors, had an effect. Certainly, his relatives seemed to establish a bizarre kind of dialogue that may have encouraged his kidnappers to consider Bigley more of an asset alive than dead. The U.S. authorities were never going to negotiate, so punishment rather than publicity was the swift outcome for the American captives. With the British, though, there seemed to be not only the prospect of a deal, but the possibility of continuing publicity. Why execute the man while he might still prove useful?

The most sophisticated theory, though, is that Zarqawi or his followers intended to use Bigley to erode the increasingly fragile links that exist between Britain and the United States. Here, the hostage-takers' methods appear to have backfired. A majority of the British public was, and remains, opposed to the Iraq war. But Britons in general have supported the refusal of successive governments to deal with hostage-takers. There is also a distinctly unsympathetic strand of British opinion, according to which Bigley had knowingly traded his safety for the huge pay available for working in Iraq and was at least partly responsible for his own misfortune. It is not a charitable view, but it tempered the initial public outcry.